Crunch Hype

Starwood Hotels has confirmed its hotel guest database of about 500 million customers has been stolen in a data breach. The hotel and resorts giant said in a statement filed with U.S. regulators that the “unauthorized access” to its guest database was detected on or before September 10 — but may have dated back as far […]

Nobody wants to be a third wheel. Unless you’re a British spy. Two of the most senior officials at British eavesdropping agency GCHQ say one way that law enforcement could access encrypted messages is to simply add themselves to your conversations. “It’s relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to […]

A founder-investor panel on augmented reality (AR) technology here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin suggests growth hopes for the space have regrouped around enterprise use-cases, after the VR consumer hype cycle landed with yet another flop in the proverbial ‘trough of disillusionment’. Matt Miesnieks, CEO of mobile AR startup 6d.ai, conceded the space has generally been on another […]

Two weeks after the New York Times revealed Facebook’s controversial work with Republican opposition research firm Definers Public Affairs, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has changed her story in significant ways. The latest revelation: Sandberg herself directed Facebook’s communications team to probe the financial ties of George Soros, left-leaning billionaire and frequent political target of the […]

No one wants to post silly, racy, or vulnerable Stories if they’re worried their boss, parents, and distant acquaintances are watching. So to get people sharing more, and more authentically, Instagram will let you share to fewer people. Today after 17 months of testing, Instagram is globally launching Close Friends on iOS and Android over […]

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created a system that can reproduce paintings from a single photo, allowing museums and art lovers to snap their favorite pictures and print new copies complete with paint textures. Called RePaint, the project uses machine learning to recreate the exact colors of each painting and […]

In the world of online language learning, there are basically two heavyweights: Duolingo and Babbel. Duolingo is betting on a freemium model and a strong focus on using algorithms to help you learn better, while Berlin-based Babbel is a paid service that employs hundreds of teachers. As Babbel co-founder and CEO Markus Witte announced at […]

Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled have agreed to “pay disgorgement, penalties and interest” for failing to disclose promotional payments from three ICOs including Centra Tech. Mayweather received $100,000 from Centra Tech while Khaled got $50,000 from the failed ICO. The SEC cited Khaled and Mayweather’s social media feeds, noting they touted securities for pay […]

Disrupt Berlin generally kicked ass yesterday, and things are only going to get better from here. Welcome, friends, to Disrupt Berlin Day 2. We have a great show in store for you, including Julie Hansen and Markus Witte from Babbel, the full cast of Accel Philippe Botteri, Sonali De Rycker, Luciana Lixandru, and Harry Nelis. […]

In a regulatory filing today, SoftBank Group said it has set an indicative price of 1,500 yen ($13.22) per share for the initial public offering of its domestic telecoms unit next month. This means the offering is potentially worth 2.4 trillion yen (about $21.16 billion), making it one of the largest IPOs ever. The price […]

Sorry folks. If you wanted to buy a ticket to Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 you’re out of luck. We’re sold out. However, you could be one of the lucky few to score a free ticket to our day-long startup-pitch extravaganza in Lagos, Nigeria on 11 December. We have a limited number of tickets available, so apply […]

Despite strong reviews and a fan petition, Netflix said today that it is cancelling “Daredevil” after three seasons. This is the latest Marvel series, after “Luke Cage” and “Iron Fist,” that Netflix has cancelled recently, and is a sign that Marvel TV and Netflix’s multi-series agreement, signed in 2013, may be hitting some bumps. Centered […]

Bright Health, another startup seeking to disrupt an antiquated industry, has raised $440 million since 2016.

NASA is ready to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than 40 years. It won’t be doing it alone, however. The agency is enlisting nine companies, large and small, to compete for a combined maximum contract value of $2.6 billion over the next 10 years. NASA released the list […]

Since 2015, AWS has had a team of solution architects working with customers to make sure they are using AWS services in a way that meets best practices around a set of defined criteria. Today, the company announced a new Well Architected tool that helps customers do this themselves in an automated way without the […]

It’s now common in tech to describe data as “the new oil or electricity” -- a fuel that will power innovation and company growth for the foreseeable future. But data is far from a novel industry.

Top tech executives from Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Oracle will head to the White House next Thursday to discuss “bold, transformational ideas” focused on U.S. innovation. The meeting, framed as a “roundtable discussion” by The Wall Street Journal, is expected to cover a broad range of emerging tech topics, from 5G to AI to quantum […]

AWS launched Lambda in 2015 and with it helped popularize serverless computing. You simply write code (event triggers) and AWS deals with whatever compute, memory and storage you need to make that work. Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced several new features to make it more developer friendly, while acknowledging that […]

Thirteen companies took the stage today at Disrupt Berlin, delivering six-minute pitches and demos, then answering free-for-all questions from expert judges. Now that the judges have given us their feedback, we’ve chosen five finalists. These finalists will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges, who […]

The Switch has been a monster hit for Nintendo by nearly every measure. The convertible console is precisely the success the company needed after a few years in the wilderness following the Wii U flop and smartphone foot-dragging. Strategy Analytics predicts more good things for the platform, predicting that Nintendo will surpass Sony in console […]

Prosecutors in South Korea have indicted the chief executive and eight other employees of Toptec Co for allegedly selling information about Samsung’s flexible OLED displays to a Chinese company. The charges detail that the company received more than $13.8 million for the information, Bloomberg reports. Toptec, a Samsung supplier that manufactures display-related equipment, has denied […]

In September, Hulu and Discovery announced a partnership for live and on-demand programming that would see Discovery’s content coming to Hulu’s streaming service. Today, as promised, those channels are going live with the launch of Discovery Networks programming across all of Hulu with Live TV packages. That means Hulu with Live TV subscribers will now […]

Kafka is an open-source tool for handling incoming streams of data. Like virtually all powerful tools, it’s somewhat hard to set up and manage. Today, Amazon’s AWS is making this all a bit easier for its users with the launch of Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka. That’s a mouthful, but it’s essentially Kafka as a […]

New numbers from Gartner this morning show solid projections for the wearable market, in spite of a few relatively lackluster years following the category’s initial explosion. The drivers for the projected growth should be no surprise to anyone who has been following it of late — namely smartwatches and ear-worn devices (the unfortunately named hearables). […]

Cruise Automation, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, is getting a new CEO. The autonomous vehicle company, which was acquired by GM in 2016 and became subsidiary GM Cruise, has tapped Dan Ammann as CEO. Ammann (shown on the right in the photo above) will step down as GM’s president, a role he’s held since […]

Today marks the close of Lyft's acquisition of Motivate, the New York City-based mobility company that owns a number of shareable bike services, like Citi Bike, Ford GoBike, Divvy, Bluebikes and Capital Bikeshare.

There’s a dark cloud on the horizon. The behavior of cloud infrastructure providers threatens the viability of open source. Thankfully, several leaders have mobilized to propose multiple solutions.

With the rise of streaming services and the trend toward cord cutting, the way U.S. consumers are watching video is also changing. Today, more than two-thirds of U.S. homes have devices that are able to stream video, according to Nielsen . In a new report out this morning, the measurement firm looked at the impact […]

Last year, $7 billion followed into ICOs. Combined with 2018, the cryptocurrency-based funding mechanism is estimated to account for $20 billion. ICOs threatened to disrupt venture capital more widely across the board, but the signs suggest that a relative status quo for investment is returning with VC capital a preferrable option once again. We’ve seen […]

A few years back, Occipital released a sensor that turned your iPad into a portable 3D scanner. Called the Occipital Structure, it packed lasers and cameras into a snap-on package that let the iPad be used for anything from accurately measuring a room’s dimensions to building 3D models for building prosthetic limbs. The catch? For […]

A year ago, YouTube launched its own take on Stories, with the addition of a new short-form video format called Reels. The feature, which was rebranded as “YouTube Stories” at last year’s VidCon, was initially available only to select YouTube creators. But in June, YouTube said it would expand Stories to all creators with over […]

Legacy is tackling an interesting problem: the reduction of sperm motility as we age. By freezing our sperm, this Swiss-based company promises to keep our boys safe and potent as we get older, a consideration that many find vital as we marry and have kids later. Legacy, which exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin […]

Alexandre Meregan says that music, and audio in general, has always been core to his life. But one day on his five-minute commute to work, trying to listen to a podcast for the first time, he realized that by the time he arrived at work he had only heard an introduction and a commercial jingle. […]

The team behind Rlay believes that blockchain technology can play a crucial role in helping businesses crowdsource their data-gathering tasks. Founder Michael Hirn said this is a problem he encountered while working with Sunstone Capital to develop a more quantitative approach to venture capital, which meant pulling startup data from a wide variety of online […]

Presenting onstage today in the 2018 TC Disrupt Berlin Battlefield is Indian agtech startup Imago AI, which is applying AI to help feed the world’s growing population by increasing crop yields and reducing food waste. As startup missions go, it’s an impressively ambitious one. The team, which is based out of Gurgaon near New Delhi, […]

Using the time-worn and trusty narrative of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as its platform, MWM Immersive, a division of Madison Wells Media, is finally taking location-based virtual reality to its logical conclusion and merging it with an immersive theater experience. Called “Chained: A Victorian Nightmare,” the new production combines live actors and an immersive […]

It can be tough for diabetes patients to keep a constant eye on their glucose levels. Spike Diabetes lets family and doctors lend a hand by sending them real-time alerts about the patient’s stats. And the app’s artificial intelligence features can even send helpful reminders or suggest the most diabetes-friendly meals when you walk into […]

Lemonade this morning revealed plans to expand into the European market. The news marks the first international expansion for the AI-powered insurance app, which launched in New York City, back in 2016. The official announcement issued by the company is extremely light on detail, with the promise to reveal more pertinent information — namely which […]

Learning platform Udacity is to axe a big chunk of its workforce — which looks to be between a fifth and a quarter — as part of a global reorganization effort, according to VentureBeat. It reports the company is cutting 125 staff from now through early 2019. We’ve also heard from a source that around 100 Udacity […]

Uber is speeding toward a historic IPO next year that could value it as high as $120 billion, but that doesn’t scare its rivals that operate across Europe. Speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, Markus Villig — the CEO of $1 billion-valued Taxify — and Via CEO Daniel Ramot, whose company has expanded from Israel into […]

Readdle launched its first app on the App Store ten years ago and recently celebrated 100 million downloads. Readdle’s Denys Zhadanov came to TechCrunch Disrupt to look back at the past ten years. “I think it's about timing. Back in 2007 when the iPhone was launched for the first time, there was no app or […]

In the future, everyone will get Blue Apron ad copy. Meantime, Anchor’s helping users monetize their shows with Sponsorships, a new program designed to match podcasters with advertisers. The feature is pretty straightforward for anyone who’s ever attempted to make some money podcasting, but now it’s integrated into the site’s overall mission of democratizing the podcasting […]

Robinhood's human resources department is keeping busy this month, announcing this morning that the zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange has hired CapitalG partner Gretchen Howard.

Sinemia announced this morning the return of its physical debit card for in-person movie ticket sales, by “popular customer demand.” The MoviePass competitor dropped the feature back in May, but the push toward a cardless system was met with pushback from customers irritated by third-party transaction fees driving up the service’s cost cutting promises. The […]

Media center app Plex today announced a partnership with streaming music service TIDAL, offering discounted access to TIDAL’s 60 million tracks and 244,000+ music videos for Plex Pass subscribers. The Plex Pass is the media center app’s own subscription program, which adds support for watching and recording from live TV as well as other premium […]

Headphone maker Sennheiser has patched its software after the company admitted a serious vulnerability that made it easy for hackers to impersonate any website — even encrypted pages. The software, which helps Mac and Windows users to connects their headphones to other devices, also installed a self-signed root certificates with an easily obtainable private key. […]

Before we send any planet-trotting robot to explore the landscape of Mars or Venus, we need to test it here on Earth. Two such robotic platforms being developed for future missions are undergoing testing at European Space Agency facilities: one that rolls, and one that hops.

Bay Area-based robotic exoskeleton company Roam announced this morning that it has secured a $12 million series A. The round, led by Yamaha Motors, with investments from Boost VC, Heuristics Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, R7 Partners, Spero Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Venture Investment Associates, brings the company’s total funding up to around $15 million. […]

Facebook pissed off journalists earlier this year when it announced that ads run by news publishers to promote their articles involving elected officials, candidates, and national issues would be included alongside political campaign ads in its ads transparency archive, albeit in a separate section. The News Media Alliance representing 2000 newspapers including the New York […]

Is barking orders at our AI-powered voice assistants turning us into jerks? Are our kids growing accustomed to commanding the Google Homes and Siris of the world to turn on the lights without the politeness of a “please”? Perhaps. With that in mind, from here on out, Google Assistant will be a bit more cheery […]